Shopify, which provides a turnkey e-commerce technology that lets anyone create a storefront online, has acquired mobile app and game studio Select Start Studios.
The acquisition will be used to further Shopify’s mobile commerce initiatives. While all Shopify stores already include mobile optimized storefronts and checkouts, the acquisition of S3 will bring over 20 new mobile-focused engineers to the Shopify team to continue developing mobile offerings for merchants. → Read More
Khojan is a new UK startup that is on a mission to help independent or boutique stores get online, aiding their discovery in the process.
Initially soft launching in London’s trendy Brick Lane and Portobello road areas, Khojan is described as an online shopping community that allows shoppers to buy products, view profiles and interact with individual shops all within one platform. Users can either browse by products, essentially rolling up all that is on offer, or by independent store, which works quite well to give a flavour of the diversity and characteristic of these iconic areas of London. Additionally, the site offers a search feature.
So, for example, Brick Lane reveals “Eastside Books”, a thirty year old independent book store, alongside “Mendoza Menswear”, which does a line in vintage menswear. Obviously, for stores like these perhaps getting online isn’t highest on the priority list, relying instead on tourist and local visitor footfall. → Read More
Last August, we first wrote about Olark, a Y Combinator-funded startup that gave e-commerce site owners a simple way to interact with their customers: an IM widget. Now, Olark is expanding the functionality of these IMs to include detailed information about that shopper in realtime, and partnering with Shopify to make it easy to install.
For example, with this new Olark tool, dubbed Shopping Cart Saver, a site owner can get an IM every time someone hits the site. And you can see the referrer indicating how they got there. While they’re there, you can see what pages they’re visiting and most importantly, what items they’re putting in their shopping cart. If a user has a question, this same IM window serves as your way to interact with them. → Read More
E-commerce has become a vast ecosystem that pumps billions upon billions of dollars through the web and easily connects consumers what their objects of desire at a single click. On the backend of e-commerce sites, there is plenty of opportunity for tech giants and startups to help power retailers’ online storefronts. Google, IBM, Microsoft and many others offer various technologies to help online retailers seamlessly sell their products on the web. One notable startup in the space, Shopify, which provides a turnkey e-commerce technology that lets anyone create a storefront online, has acquired MNDCreative, the developers of StoreSync, a mobile e-commerce management platform. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Unsurprisingly, Shopify’s acquisition of StoreSync aims to help expand its existing offerings onto mobile devices. StoreSync will be available exclusively to Shopfiy customers, and will be integrated tightly with its web platform. → Read More
Ottawa-based Shopify launched a lot later than originally promised (last fall), but it was worth the wait. They’ve launched a private beta and plan to open their doors permanently in May. Shopify is a hosted ecommerce solution with integrated payments. People who sell stuff online, or want to, are going to like it. You can set up a store in moments, add items to sell, upload images, add tags and group items, and integrate paypal or a credit card processor for payments. Reporting is excellent, and they’ve even thought to include a RSS feed of recent orders to keep track of sales. See here for more details on features. In general, sellers will be able to create a very professional multi-page website with little or no programming skills in just a few minutes. There are a number of pre-made themes for the shop, and themes can be modified by directly manipulating the CSS. Shopify has also released a product called Vision, which is a downloadable client application for designers to build and modify their own shopify shop themes. Creating a store is free. Shopify takes a 3.75% commission on all sales. So Shopify will help you set up a very nice store at a reasonable price. But they should quickly build tools to help people promote these stores as well (Vendio, for example, has some basic promotional tools, and they also assist with ebay listings). If shopify can help store owners with marketing, too, it’ll become a more useful service. For more on shopify, see their blog and this interview with development lead Tobi Lutke. If anyone knows about good sample shops, please let me know about them. → Read More
Scott Lake’s Shopify, based in Ottawa, Canada, has been threatening to launch for some time now (the site still says it will launch in the Fall of 2005). It promises to solve many of the woes associated with selling online today, with solutions for hosting, design and integrated payment options: In fall 2005, Jaded Pixel will be releasing Shopify 1.0! Shopify is a hosted e-commerce solution that removes the traditional barriers that have kept many individuals and small business from selling online. It is a Web 2.0 product that focuses on providing buyers and sellers with the features essential to completing e-commerce transactions. It is simple, elegant and desperately needed. Whenever it launches, I’ll be looking forward to checking it out. The Shopify blog is here. Sign up for launch notification here → Read More
San Francisco, CA
